Evaluating The Impacts of MPRA Design on Regulatory Activity

Adelaide Tovar, PhD, will present her HGG Advances paper on how massively parallel reporter assay (MPRA) design can alter enhancer activity across the same set of fragments. She and co-authors found that using a tissue-specific promoter in MPRAs instead of a generic housekeeping promoter can enhance detection of activity from tissue-specific regulatory elements.

Overview of Presentation:

• Our study examined MPRA design effects on activity of type 2 diabetes-associated regulatory elements.
• Fragments overlapping cell-specific TF motifs displayed higher activity with a tissue-specific promoter over a generic one.
• Deleting/mutating those same TF motifs disrupted tissue-specific promoter-biased regulatory activity in a diabetes-relevant cell type.